How and why should you optimize the performance of mobile APIs?

At one point or other we have all experienced mobile apps that we wish were faster and more responsive, but in almost all cases slow digital experiences can be traced back to bottlenecks on the server. You could build the world’s fastest mobile app but if it sits on top of slow API, your mobile application users will have a poor user experience.

Optimizing the on-mobile performance of the application is critical. It is important to ensure that mobile clients be remotely served both data and application resources in a reliably performant manner, ultimately enabling and preserving a positive mobile application user experience. Special considerations need to be taken into account when engineering mobile-based applications.

APIs are the lifeblood of mobility. They give developers the simplified access to the data and services needed to build amazing apps. In fact, good mobile APIs act as a spur to innovation. Think of them as Lego blocks: the better and more varied the collection of blocks you make available, the better and more creative the objects people build. An enterprise that makes mobile-optimized APIs widely accessible to developers is positioned to make terrific innovation leaps, and at a pace that would never be achievable by top-down planning alone.

Of course not every API can be anticipated in advance. So the mobile app development platforms should also provide developers an easy way to create the ones they need. An effective mechanism for building mobile APIs must include:

a) Orchestration: the API orchestration ability to leverage data from multiple data sources, all within a single mobile-optimized API.

b) Optimization: boiling down the data set to its essential payload size for consumption by a mobile app. For instance, if a traditional web API returns 20 fields, the mobile variant might want only five.

c) Transformation: converting the data format from legacy styles such as XML or SOAP to a mobile-optimized format such as JSON.